Abstract

Due to the fragmented nature of the UK’s social care sector and its disjointed avenues of data collection, there is an urgent need to aggregate existing datasets so they can be used most effectively to plan and conduct research which enhances service quality. LSE’s Care Policy and Evaluation Centre (CPEC), with funding from the National Institute for Health and Care Research – School for Social Care Research, has created a Catalogue of Social Care Measures (CSCM), providing a web-based platform where large UK datasets, containing measures on need, receipt or provision of social care services, can be viewed together in one place. The CPEC team benefited greatly from input and advice from colleagues at King’s College London who developed and launched a Catalogue of Mental Health Measures in 2021.

The CSCM offers multiple ways to search within and between datasets, enabling researchers and other interested parties to identify data that exists on a chosen topic and view related measures. The catalogue also provides information on how to access datasets. At its inception, the CSCM is a collection of measures from datasets comprising repeated cross-sectional studies, household panel surveys, cohorts and more. We will present the catalogue and its structure and provide a demonstration of how the catalogue can be used.